inaugurationanimation

I made a video. It's a simple affair, no sound. If anyone wants to mess around with it, chop it up, add some sound, whatever, I can make the clip available.

The video can be seen here:

http://vimeo.com/2917641

Comments

, Michael Szpakowski

That's rather lovely Pall ( I'm sitting here about 10 mins in, but I assume plot-wise you're going to be springing no suprises).
Indeed it's the loveliness of it which makes me quite thoughtful. It reminds me of two other very nicely executed pieces of work - Mark Tribe's Revelation projects, particularly the first one

http://www.nothing.org/revelation1/index.htm

which stripped the Amnesty International site of all verbal context.
In Tribe's words: "the Amnesty site is reduced to geometrical compositions of color fields and photographic images. "
It's something about rendering the political gorgeous that draws me in and repels me at the same time although I must admit I feel a good deal more discomfort at the Amnesty piece ( and I suppose the "disappearance" metaphor might justify it, although I thought then and continue to think 'What a strange choice to erase the very urgent & brutally functional raison d'etre of this particular site *as art*' ) than Tribe's subsequent CNN piece or your vid.

Indeed, I guess, as I think a bit more about it there's a celebratory quality to your aestheticisation of the footage which currently fits just right with the almost religious fervour of the day. It'll be interesting to re-view it in a year or two. It will certainly acquire more even more resonance as time goes by.
Thanks!
michael

, Pall Thayer

No, don't wait for any surprises. It's very much about "the moment" as-is and therefore an unedited rendering of a live-feed capture.

As far as a conceptual side goes, what I find interesting is to consider why millions of people wanted to be present at this event. It was a very moving and historic event and the multitudes of "regular" people in attendance made it even more moving. But what is it exactly that they're after? It isn't about hearing or even seeing what's going on although we always attach a different sort of reality to the experience of actually being somewhere. There was definitely no shortage of live feeds for getting that "real-time" experience of the event. The desire for a physical, first-hand experience is much more about being a part of the spectacle. Embedding oneself into a memorable moment that is as much about about being seen as it is about seeing. Thus what I think this video does is to address that spectacle and to dress up that element of it. It makes you wonder whether the spectacle, with the complexity of what's being heard removed, is any less moving than the whole. So instead of being about Obama taking over the Presidency and telling us what he's going to do with it, it's about the sensation of something positive on a very grand scale.

Pall